This paper explores a situated approach to developing one's relational design practice by using critical fabulations to support ontological re-working. Fabulating is used as a tool to re-discover and embody relational elements from the authors' own culture and history. We engage with Nordic mythology and folklore starting from Arturo Escobar & Marisol de la Cadena's propositions for pluriversal design and Pluriversal Contact Zones to guide our search. The work takes a critical stance against how the modern episteme shapes design and reinforces anthropocentrism, patriarchalism, and colonialism. Crafting critical fabulations was a co-labouring, idiotic practice of not knowing that allowed us to question dominant narratives and be critical towards our own design practice. It enabled exploring and imagining alternatives from elements of situated relational knowledge that have been obscured by modernity, allowing us to embed local ideas of relationality into our design practices. Our contribution lies in the use of old cosmologies, mythologies, and folklore to give such insights. Through this, we offer a prototype for designing relationally within, as, and for Pluriversal Contact Zones and invite designers to reimagine their own practices beyond modern dichotomies. ... Read more

This paper re-reads participation through the lens of spatial politics, arguing that spatiality is not a neutral backdrop for relational processes but a contested terrain. This terrain is shaped by power, exclusion, and the situated resistances that emerge within it. We use "resistance"to refer to agonistic practices of imagination - acts that resist erasure, marginalization, and the extractive and solutionist logics that often underpin design interventions. Drawing on decolonial thought and the notion of epistemic extractivism, we examine how Participatory Design, when not critically attuned to these dynamics, risks reproducing centralized models of knowledge production. These conditions are not peripheral to design - they are already there, and they cannot be ignored. They are entangled in place: shaping how entities (human, non-human, less-than- and more-than-human) are confined, erased, or rendered dominant. Participatory Design enters this terrain. It does not operate outside of it. Therefore, we argue for the need to explicitly address the spatial dimension of oppression in Participatory Design practices - to recognize spatiality as a structuring force that defines who may participate, how, and on what terms. We present PDC Places as a curatorial and infrastructural experiment within the Participatory Design Conference 2026, conceived as a decentralized constellation of place-based initiatives, problematizing entangled forms of oppression from their situatedness. A constellation suggests neither hierarchy nor homogeneity. It is a pattern perceived across distance, composed of bodies that maintain their own trajectories. Thinking Places as a constellation resists central-peripheral logics and instead foregrounds relational alignment without subsumption. What connects them is not thematic uniformity, but shared tensions around power, spatiality, and participation. Rather than satellite events, Places were framed as situated ecosystems grounded in local urgencies, networks, and struggles that need to be identified, and understood to envision more just Participatory Design engagements. Through this initiative, we sought to challenge extractive participation - where knowledge is often gathered and mobilized toward innovation within frameworks that ignore or flatten local struggles - and to foreground Place as an ethical and political condition of participation. We argue here that challenging extractive participation requires learning to attune to situated practices already in motion. This paper aims to further articulate a theoretical positioning on spatiality and power in Participatory Design by engaging with the Places presented at the PDC2026 conference, functioning there as distributed enactments of these tensions. ... Read more

This half-day symposium at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), TU Delft, explores ethics, values, and culture in design research and education across IDE's three departments: Human-Centered Design (HCD), Strategic Product Design (SDE), and Design for Interaction & Social Innovation (DOS). The program features four 20-minute presentations of four IDE researchers (Özkaramanll, Colombo, Secomandi and Singh) from the three departments, followed by Q&A and a final panel moderated by Tassinari, addressing Design Anthropology for Social Change; Design under Pressure: Exploring the Tensions in Design Ethics; Designing for Mutual Recognition and Human Freedom; and Designing Feminist AI: Towards Inclusivity and Empowerment. An accompanying exhibition of provotypes, developed by approximatively 400 master students, creates a material dialogue with researchers. The symposium is conceived as a dialogic and generative space of encounter and co-creation, engaging researchers, educators, PhD candidates, and students, aiming to generate internal discussion within IDE, strengthening the dialogue across the departments on the ethical and political implications of its ongoing design research and pedagogy and connecting it to the international design community through PDC Places. By hosting this event, IDE creates a plural, reflexive space that acknowledges the entanglements of design with patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric frameworks while exploring embodied, feminist, and decolonial ways of knowing, practicing, and teaching design, inviting participants to collectively reimagine what it means to do and teach design otherwise. ... Read more

The Situated Action is part of San Vittore Situated Vocabulary, an ongoing participatory research project developed inside Milan's San Vittore Prison. During the PDC2026 Conference, the action is hosted at Open Casello (Milan), in close proximity to the prison, and it stages an "impossible dialogue": an indirect yet reciprocal exchange between the prison and the city, through a spatial and writing-based installation. The meanings of four key words emerged from co-design sessions with inmates, prison staff, and volunteers - Life/Death, Justice/Injustice, Responsibility, Fun/Boredom - are presented as fragmented textual constellations holding tension, silences, and contradictions embedded in everyday carcereal life. Participants are called to move through reading and informal conversation and are finally invited to live a personal response. Rather than seeking consensus, the action invites contributors to position themselves within unresolved tensions. The collected reflections will later be reintroduced inside the prison, extending the dialogue and positioning participatory design as a situated and agonistic practice that holds plurality and disagreement as conditions for coexistence. ... Read more

Participatory Design (PD) has played a pivotal role in broadening the horizons of Design by fostering new forms of social engagement in the public sphere. However, the emerging social, economic, and environmental challenges of these times force us to question and reconsider our work from a slightly shifted perspective. This paper introduces a case study that employs Donna Haraway's (1988) concept of "situated knowledge" to reframe the practice of PD in the context of urban regeneration. By emphasizing the situatedness of knowledge and acknowledging the diversity of perspectives within the Nolo neighbourhood (Milan, Italy), this approach aims at co-creating inclusive, context-specific discourses with the help of the local communities. The work presented here explores how this epistemological shift can address the challenges of engaging with diverse human and non-human communities through the utilization of the Situated Vocabulary—an ongoing research project activated within the framework of the urban living lab of Off Campus Nolo. ... Read more